Inside Google+ - how the search giant plans to go social

Emerald Sea is not a Facebook killer, Gundotra told me. In fact,
he added, somewhat puckishly, "people are barely tolerant of the
Facebook they have," citing a consumer satisfaction study that
rated it barely higher than the IRS. Instead, he says, the
transformation will offer people a better Google.

Nonetheless, it was impossible to deny that "+1" (as it was then
called) offered some of features closely associated with Facebook.
The overall difference is that Google would try to leverage its
assets to do certain things more effectively than Facebook, and
attempt other things that Facebook can't pull off yet.

"The internet is nothing but software fabric that connects the
interactions of human beings," Gundotra said. "Every piece of
software is going to transformed by this primacy of people and this
shift." Gundotra said that to date identifying people has been "the
most epic failure of Google... Because we were focusing on
organising the world's information, the search company failed to do
the most important search of all."

But that was about to change.

"Google, thank god, has a few assets. We have hundreds of
millions people who love us -- they love YouTube, they love Gmail,
they love search. What if we were to go across each of those
categories and rethink them? The things we have to do are obvious,
but Google hasn't done them. And so Bradley and I have the odd
chance to help lead the company to go fix these sins."

"If you look at Google's mission of organising information, you
can't do that absent people," added Horowitz. "The information I
care about is very much informed by who I am and who I know. That's
the real motivation for doing this."

It hasn't been easy. Emerald Sea has been the rare initiative in
Google where the company was not breaking ground but defensively
responding to a competitor's success. (One engineer has described
this process as "chasing taillights," noting that me-too-ism has
never been a strength for Google.) It's also, claims Gundotra, the
most extensive companywide initiative in Google's history.

Because of the pressure the stakes and the scale, Gundota
insisted that Emerald Sea should be an exception to Google's usual
consensus-based management style. He successfully argued that he,
with Horowitz's help, would set the vision. Even the founders would
step back. Even though In 2010 Sergey Brin had a desk in Building
2000 and Larry Page dropped in a couple of times a week, their role
was advisory with Emerald Sea. "This is a top-down mandate where a
clear vision is set out, and then the mode of moving forward is
that you answer to Vic," Rick Klau told me last year. "If Vic says
'That looks good,' then it looks good."

It wasn't until October 2010 that Emerald Sea was ready for "dog
food," the process by which Googlers would internally test out the
product. (The expression comes from the expression "eating your own
dog food," an exercise that presumably improves canine cuisine.)
One fall evening just before 8 p.m., Gundotra began the process by
e-mailing invitations to about 50 fellow Googlers to join Emerald
Sea. "I sent it from my laptop," says Gundotra, "All the engineers
were all crowded around."

Everybody stuck around that night to see how quickly it would
spread around Google. The predictions varied. The most optimistic
came from Brin, who felt that whole company would adopt Emerald Sea
within five days. More pessimistic team members thought that only
about 600 or so Googlers might take the trouble to sign up, create
a new profile and upgrade to the new system.

It turned out that 600 people signed up in the first hour. Soon
thousands of Googlers were signing up. "The server started melting
at 11 p.m.," says Gundotra, and the engineers hastily beefed up the
data center allocations. By the next morning over 90 percent of all
of Google's world wide employees had updated to the system and
turned it on.

Gundotra and Horowitz were thrilled. But it soon became apparent
that there were problems with the product. The consensus of most of
Googlers who played with it was that it was a noble, necessary
effort that wasn't ready for prime time.

"We put the product to [dog food] before it was fully baked,
before we hardened the system and polished it and knew what we were
doing," says Horowitz. "We had no getting-started screen, no intro
video. It was hard for people to get their hands around what it is
and how to begin interacting with it. It was as if Facebook had
been in stealth mode for seven years and then launched in its
entirety at once today -- it would have been an overwhelming,
hard-to-comprehend, hard-to-understand system. The feedback we was
got was: Simplify."

The Emerald Sea team got to work streamlining and
reconceptualising. Some features were pushed off until future
releases. Others -- like the +1 button -- were unmoored into
separate products and launched separately. (The unofficial slogan
was ESAP -- Emerald Sea Acceleration Plan.)

When a new version of Emerald Sea returned to dog food this
spring, it was stripped down. Also, the team changed the invitation
process to limit it only to people who were more motivated to use
it. The response from Googlers on the second pass has been much
better.

The dog food success made it possible for the milestone
announced Tuesday -- a "field test" where for the first time
outsiders will participate in the prototype system. Depending on
how that goes, the next step will be a wider release, but it may be
some weeks before the public can sign up. (Is the deliberate
rollout a direct consequence of the train wreck that came from
Google's failure to test Buzz externally before its launch? You
betcha.)